Palermo: What Happened to the Arabs of Sicily?

It’s a question we’re often asked on the ground in Palermo: are there any Arabs left in the city today? And if not, what became of them? The answer, as it turns out, takes a detour through a water clock, a coin, and one of the most extraordinary rulers of the medieval world.

Three languages, three calendars, one clock

Walk into the Palatine Chapel and, on the left as you enter, you’ll find a stone inscribed not once but three times: in Latin, in Greek, and in Arabic. It commemorates a water clock, long since lost, made in March 1142 “by order of the magnificent King Roger.”

The three inscriptions aren’t direct translations of one another. Each is written in the idiom of its own language, and each records the date according to its own calendar: 1142 in the Latin, 536 in the Arabic, using the Hijri calendar dated from Mohammed’s flight to Mecca in 622 AD, and 6650 in the Greek, using the Byzantine calendar’s reckoning from the creation of the world in 5509 BC. Three faiths, three tongues, three ways of counting the years, on a single stone. It’s as good a summary of twelfth-century Palermo as you’ll find anywhere in the city.

That trilingual society wasn’t confined to the streets of the capital, either. Roger II himself had grown up in a Norman household in the Greek-speaking village of San Marco d’Alunzio, across the valley from Arabic-speaking Alcara Li Fusi. Latin remained the language of the church, and the Normans’ own French added a fourth thread to what was already a rich linguistic weave.

A king, a coin, and a number system

Roger also minted his own coinage, in Palermo and Messina, and in doing so left behind something historians consider genuinely remarkable: a bronze follaro, struck in 1138, that carries its date in Arabic numerals rather than words, using the Hijri calendar. It’s thought to be the earliest dated use of positional-notation numerals anywhere in Europe, decades before Leonardo Fibonacci would popularise the same system for merchants and bankers across the continent.

We’ve told that story in full elsewhere, including Fibonacci’s Sicilian travels and his friendship with Roger’s grandson Frederick II, in The Adoption of Arabic Numerals in Europe. For now, it’s enough to know that the same court that inscribed a clock in three languages was also, quietly, changing the way Europe would one day count.

A queen born to a dead king

Roger’s throne passed down through his sons William I and William II, and it’s here that the story takes its strangest turn. Roger’s youngest child, Constance, wasn’t born until nearly nine months after her father’s death, and as the last in line among six children she seemed destined for a quiet life. William II, dying young and childless, arranged her betrothal to Henry, son of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, most likely to secure an alliance rather than to unite two crowns. But it was this single decision, tradition says, that cost William his throne’s independence: Constance married Henry in Milan in 1186, and when William died in 1189 without an heir, the Sicilian crown and the imperial one both had a claim on the same family.

Constance’s own life reads like something from folklore. Captured by rival knights and held in Palermo, released only after papal pressure, she was forty and pregnant by the time Henry finally seized the city in 1194. To prove beyond doubt that the child was truly hers, she gave birth in a tent erected in the public square of Jesi, in front of the assembled townspeople. That child was Frederick.

Constance ruled as regent after Henry’s sudden death in 1198, before dying herself within the year. She was laid to rest in the Cathedral of Palermo, in a porphyry tomb of the kind reserved for royalty alone.

Stupor Mundi

Frederick grew up in the Palermo court speaking five languages, Greek, Arabic, Latin, Provençal and Sicilian, and by all accounts possessed a formidable intellect. It earned him the epithet by which he’s still known today: Stupor Mundi, the Wonder of the World.

His court became one of the great centres of learning in medieval Europe, a place where Arabic scholarship, still well ahead of anything north of the Alps, could reach northern European minds through translation. He employed Jewish scholars to render Greek and Arabic texts into Latin, and hosted the Englishman Michael Scot, who produced fresh translations of Aristotle and his Arab commentators. Frederick patronised the poets Giacomo da Lentini and Piere delle Vigne as they developed an entirely new verse form at his court, the sonnet, which Dante would take up more than fifty years later.

He also wrote the world’s first treatise on falconry, grounded in his own observation and experiment rather than received wisdom, kept a menagerie that included giraffes, cheetahs and an elephant, and founded, in 1224, what is now the world’s oldest state university, in Naples. He was also, by several contemporary accounts, an unusually curious and occasionally troubling figure: he’s said to have conducted early experiments in language acquisition, raising infants in silence to discover what tongue, if any, they would speak unprompted. It didn’t work; the chronicler Salimbene records that the children died without the ordinary comfort of a human voice.

The answer to the question

Which brings us back to where we started. It’s tempting to picture twelfth-century Palermo as a permanent, easy multiculturalism, three languages on one stone, Muslims, Christians and Jews all coexisting under one roof. The truth is harder. Sicily’s Muslim population had likely been under strain since the middle of the twelfth century, and the great Friday mosque of Palermo, remember, had already given way to the Cathedral. Frederick, for all his evident sympathy for Sicily’s Arab community, spent long periods away from the island as Holy Roman Emperor, and it was during these absences that unrest among the Muslim population grew.

The upshot, beginning in 1224, was the forced deportation of Sicily’s entire Muslim population, an estimated 60,000 people, to the mainland town of Lucera in Puglia. With that, the Arab presence in Sicily came to an end. Lucera itself lasted only until 1300, when it was sacked and its inhabitants sold into slavery.

Frederick died in 1250, and was brought back to Palermo to be buried in the Cathedral alongside his mother Constance, his father Henry VI, and his grandfather Roger II, four generations of one extraordinary, contradictory century, all resting in the same building that guests visit today on Esplora Travel’s small-group cultural tour of Sicily.